The Net Beneath Us: A Novel

FALL

Ethan Arnasson bent to fasten the chain to the skid cart as the saws buzzed in the distance and the horses behind him stirred in the leaves and forest funk. A root popped beneath his feet, a shift deep below ground that sent a tremor through his backbone and knees.

He straightened and looked out.

There across the woods, beneath a great white pine, stood what could only be the ghost of his younger brother.

Robby stood solid and strong in the way that he always stood, wearing an orange helmet, rumbling his saw; he hopped around that pine skinny and quick; smart-mouthed and smiley Robby who everybody liked, who died one summer even though he was younger, dead now twenty years, and yet there he stood not fifty feet away.

Ethan watched transfixed. Robby’s saw churned out a bright cloud of blue exhaust, and the air shimmered between them, crosshatched with dusty bars of light. The blade sank into the tree, dust spraying out in a thick white plume. The smell of wood chips and gasoline ripened; the noise crested to a shrill pitch, then cut out. Robby flipped his visor up, tipped his head back, and the ghost disappeared.

Ethan fell slack against the skid. His heart hammered under his work jacket and he took out a handkerchief from his back pocket. Of course, it was just Silas working over there, his nephew Silas wearing his helmet, holding his saw. Ethan wiped the sweat and dust from his worn-down eyes. It was uncanny how the boy moved so much like his father had, how he squinted up at that pine. Ethan still thought of Silas as the boy he was when his father died, but he’d grown now, hadn’t he? Stepped up into the full sun of his life with the business he was running and the house he was building, married with a wife and kids; not a boy at all. This must be what parents meant when they said, My, how time flies.

Some things sneak up on you when you aren’t even looking and spread themselves out across several years’ time; other things change right away, inside the space of a single heartbeat.

Silas figured it out the moment before it happened. He stood back, peering up into the boughs of that pine. The saw idled, the horses chuffed. Ethan was only watching because he thought he saw a ghost, but then he knew it, too, the moment still and brightly lit as winter air.

Something was wrong with that pine.

1

Elsa Arnasson was making dirt. Wearing their son in a backpack carrier, with her long Nordic hair caught up loose and haphazard at her neck, she carried the empty compost container and walked up the hill away from the garden, crossing the field that was their front lawn and swinging her arms, because life in the country didn’t mean you had to be content with the dirt you got. Nope. You could follow a recipe to make better dirt. New and improved dirt, because, she had discovered, everything about living in the country was about following a recipe.

Already she had made Christmas tree ornaments, vegetarian casseroles, and dyes made from onion skins and beets to color her own Easter eggs. That morning she’d made pancakes served with the wild blueberries she’d picked that summer by hand—berries so small they resembled capers, the mosquitoes so bad she thought she’d go mad. But she was starting to get the hang of it, life in the country, her body always in motion. And the recipe for dirt was simple: one shady patch of earth, a bushel of leaves, and scraps from your kitchen. Layer, water, repeat. She’d read that nearly a quarter of all household garbage could be used for compost, and now it was working, their first batch of topsoil, what gardeners called black gold, and she could turn it and touch it and crumble the dirt between her own two hands.

We’ll grow carrots and potatoes and mushrooms, she said to Finn as she went inside, everything a we with babies because experts agreed—explaining things helped them develop language skills. Their daughter in first grade could already read. Hester had asked for pancakes that morning and Elsa had made them—with whole wheat flour and yoghurt she’d cultured from raw milk. She’d made yoghurt! Her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the house they were building into the side of a hill—what she thought of with some affection as their cave.

Squash and corn and pun’kins. She imitated a country twang, jerked her chin with a funky rocking motion, the baby riding along as she washed her hands at the kitchen sink. The water came not from the antique spigot but from the blue water jugs lining her countertop. And she’d never imagined it would take this long to build a house—they’d been living this way four years! But a person could get used to anything, she’d told Silas that morning, washing her hands in the pan of warm water she kept in the kitchen sink. She’d turned to him with a burst of affection.

He’d been sitting there with their two children, Silas, his back to her in a wooden chair, the sleeves of his plaid flannel rolled up. The muscles of his forearms tanned and strong as he tossed their daughter into the air. Hester’s hair flew out like spokes around the sun and Finn banged away on his high chair tray. It was the picture of everything she’d always wanted—noise, color, mess. And love. Elsa could feel the love beaming out from every face.

It was never her dream to live this way—independent, not connected to the grid. She didn’t grow up in the country, didn’t grow up anywhere, and would never think of herself as a country woman even now. Before moving out here with Silas she hardly knew how to make her own toast let alone yoghurt, and gardening was something migrant workers did in a field. We have a guy for that, her father always said. But Elsa met Silas during a time in her life when she needed something more to believe in, and Silas had ideals big enough for them both.

Drying her hands, she hefted up the laundry basket with its wet clothes and headed back outside.

In her tall brown boots she crossed the porch into the sun and squinted, stopping to adjust to the bright outdoors. A breeze blew down leaves in a dry gold rain. Finn in his backpack tugged at her hair, just the two of them in a clearing on a warm fall day. Leaves cartwheeled past her feet, past the fire pit Silas dug for them and the folding chairs he put out within hearing distance of the baby monitor, and past the spot where they’d spent two summers camping in a trailer. Silas, so respectful of the money she’d given to invest in their land—the last of her mother’s inheritance, what she thought of as Winnie’s legacy—he did everything the right way and he did it himself, the permits and digging, the gravel and concrete, septic tanks and inverters with wiring and insulation and the trees he felled and peeled by hand. Why buy new fixtures made in China from plastic when you can go to an auction fifty miles away and buy solid brass for three bucks? Why spend six gallons of water per flush when you can incinerate and compost the ashes? Why eat meat when there are so many different kinds of legumes? Why indeed. She never imagined it would take this long, thought they’d have the house finished before Finn was born. It was such a relief to finally move in, but the house was only a basement with cold cinder-block walls and windowless rooms. She’d opened boxes of cookware and dishes, the silver chest and wedding china from her grandmother, and she didn’t know what to do with these things, her old life so different from how she lived now—surrounded by mortar and nail guns, chain saws and mauls, the spiders and snakes winding through the grass.

But for the first time in her life, she was starting to feel it: that she belonged. Not just because she’d made a family here, but because she felt it—a connection to something bigger than just herself, the rolling land, the rousing air.

It came out from the dark pines behind the garden: a puffball that floated in the breeze.

It came like the white fluff of a dandelion only larger, an airy jewel suspended in sunlight that seemed to glow although it was a hundred feet away. It moved on an invisible current and drifted through the trees, played peekaboo behind the boughs, bobbed in and out of shadow. It captured her full attention then because of how it crossed their field toward them, and then hovered, right in front of her, right at eye level—how friendly it seemed, interested, even! She wasn’t imagining it—Finn in the backpack gurgled and kicked his legs.

She opened to the moment, forgot about the laundry basket in her hands, the baby on her back, and the house they were building. She forgot about everything and watched this puffball as a buzzing sensation moved through her, small at first, and then rising to fill her entire being, her whole body filled with a sense of rightness, a sense of peace so strong, she couldn’t imagine feeling anything but good ever again. This beautiful day, this home they were building and the children they were raising, all of it exactly right, exactly as it should be. After getting so many things wrong, after losing her mom and leaving school and disappointing her dad, she was finally in the right place doing the right thing, and they would be okay.

She thought this, and the puffball whirled away, spinning off into the trees.

From out on the road came the honking of a car horn. It blasted through the trees as tires crunched along gravel, the horn blaring on and on, their driveway long and winding because Silas had wanted their house set way back from the road. Through the bare branches the sun flashed along the vehicle, and Elsa recognized the Jeep that belonged to Luvera Arnasson, Silas’s aunt who lived eight miles up the road. She and Ethan had practically raised her husband on their small dairy farm, they’d lived here all their lives—and Luvera with her country know-how and thirty years’ more life experience with everything would no doubt point out that she, Elsa, was doing something wrong.

But not even Luvera could get to her—everywhere under her skin still tingled and buzzed. Luvera turned the car around in the dirt lot with her window rolled down and her continuous honking, as if Elsa weren’t standing right there.

There’s been an accident, Luvera shouted, almost barking. Ethan and Silas. We have to get to the logging site. Now.

Her words had jagged edges, chaotic lines. Her hair tied back with bangs over her small, peering eyes.

Elsa? Luvera leaned forward. Did you hear what I said? We have to go now. Get in the car.

Yes. She looked around. This beautiful day, the house they were building. I hear. She pulled out the plastic legs on the backpack—what she thought of as landing gear—and set her son down. Worked her shoulders free from the straps and turned to Finnegan Arnasson, nine months old. An accident? she thought, kissing his feet. Did we have an oopsie-daisy accident? She couldn’t feel bad. Spilling a glass of milk at dinnertime was an accident, but nothing to get worked up over.

I should get his diaper bag, she said, lifting out Finn. I should run up to the house.

Okay, fine. Leave him here. Luvera unbuckled her seat belt and hustled out of the car. Do what you need to do but hurry. I’ll get him buckled in.

Luvera took her little boy. Even though she had no children of her own, Luvera had purchased a used car seat and installed it in her Jeep. She kept an antique high chair in her kitchen and a children’s Bible in the living room. She also canned her own jam and raised chickens and made her own soap from the goats she milked by hand.

What are you still standing there for? Go go go! she said. And get enough diapers. We might be gone awhile.

We might be gone awhile. Elsa folded up the phrase like she folded up the diapers and clothes. She packed a bag in the cool, quiet house, while her thoughts floated like the puffball in the breeze. There were no problems, nothing had weight. The logging site. An accident.

She thought about the last time Silas had an accident, the summer they were living in the trailer. He was working at the sawmill on their back forty. It was hot, the night air filled with heat lightning and fireflies. She’d made dinner over an open campfire but he never came, and after getting Hester to sleep, she went back there into the woods by herself.

It was hard to see, the air hazy, cobwebbed with dusk. She found him working late, taking apart the whole sawmill, humming to himself.

What happened? She tried to sound amused but was actually horrified by the sight of things, the splintered logs, the jagged teeth of a crooked blade. She expected there to be blood on his hands but he only took the thermos she brought him and grinned.

I know it’s a mess, he laughed. Broke the welds and everything but it’s my fault, I was rushing. The saw had kicked back and torqued the carriage out of alignment, causing a massive jam, wrecking the blade.

What are you going to do? she said.

And he told her, as if it were obvious, Keep on keeping on.

She came out of the house with the diaper bag on her shoulder, Luvera bent over in the back door of the car, the window rolled down, the engine still running.

Luvera?

Oh, thank goodness. She backed out, shut the car door.

Are they okay?

Luvera straightened. It’s bad, she said to Elsa, sending the words down like a hammer to the pearl of her day.

2

Luvera Arnasson drove white-knuckled, clutching the steering wheel. Of all the women Silas could have fallen for, why did he pick this one? Elsa sat there tall and erect, almost lordly in the seat next to her—she didn’t know a cattail from a cottonwood, but she had good posture. The car jostled over gravel and into pitted ruts. At the crossroads Luvera swung left and accelerated out onto blacktop.

The tires hummed along in the silence. They were on a county road now with nothing in front of them but ten minutes of empty road. No telephone poles or power lines, just miles of roadside ditches choked thick with shrubs and grasses, alder brush, and willow. A few dirt roads branched off to the left or right, driveways to hunting cabins or snowmobile trails or old logging roads closed by the county, but nothing else. Silas wanted it this way. She and Ethan had purchased this sixty-acre parcel for him when he graduated from his land management program at college—and they’d gotten a steal on it from a survivalist who’d been disappointed when after Y2K the world didn’t end. But by then, he had already met Elsa.

I think I’m in love! he announced one August at the age of twenty-one, home to help with the harvest. Ethan had already gone to bed, Luvera in her bathrobe, but Silas followed her around the kitchen. I mean, she’s way out of my league, it’ll probably never happen. His ears flushed rosy as peonies. "She’s lived all over the place, Rhode Island, Switzerland, Texas. But we had this connection, I mean, it was like we recognized each other. And when she reads me poetry, I think I actually understand it. He recited the poetry to her, right there by the kitchen sink. ‘I have no name for what circles so perfectly, a secret turning in us, and what comes to rest in me, a turning night of stars.’" He read from a book Elsa had given him, a poet called Rumi; he’d never read poetry before.

The tires hummed along the tarmac. Elsa clung to the diaper bag as though it were a life raft. She didn’t go to church; she went to poetry readings and wore crystals around her neck. She turned up her nose at the smell of the goats and recoiled from the unwashed eggs covered in green chicken poop. But she loved nature, she’d told Luvera, And I’ve always loved trees.

Luvera had looked at her. You know what Silas does, right? He comes from a family of loggers. After college, he plans to make a living by cutting trees down.

Oh, yes, I know, she said. Sustainable forestry management. He told me about his business plans, to harvest timber the slow way using draft horses and … skids? She touched a napkin lightly to her lips. They were all sitting around the dining room table at the farmhouse, their first supper together, and Elsa had brought over a pie that she made herself, Luvera remembered, a raspberry pie that spilled juices dark red.

One year later, they married. Of course, Elsa was pretty, her skin pampered and smooth and her things of the highest quality, not like the women from around here. Luvera had never been to college, never been anyplace. Something about Elsa’s face made her uncomfortable, as though she shouldn’t be looking at it, just like she shouldn’t walk into the house with muddy shoes after being in the barn. A silly thing to think, she knew. Elsa was just a young woman in the bloom of motherhood, and it became her, gave a soft fullness to her figure and face.

They were all surprised when the young couple announced it was time to start building on the land. Hester was only two, Elsa a new mom. They stayed with Ethan and Luvera at the farmhouse during that first winter, and once, while cleaning, Luvera noticed a pretty green bottle sitting out on the bathroom counter. La Mer, it was called, a lifting eye serum, and what on earth that was, Luvera did not know. But later when she looked it up online, she discovered it cost two hundred and sixty dollars—for one tiny bottle! A world of things opened to her then, things she did not even know enough about to want. It intimidated her, that Elsa came from money, that she’d lived all over the world.

Beside her, the young woman swept up a few blond strands and tucked them by the side of her smooth dear cheek. Her demeanor aloof, her movements hesitant, stiff, as if at any moment she might change her mind and take the gesture back. It was difficult to be comfortable around her because she hardly seemed comfortable with herself. Just give her a chance, Silas had said. Just get to know her. But Elsa was hard to get to know. The things she said, it was never about practical matters, like what to make for dinner, but strange observations about inanimate objects, as if they had agendas. I don’t think my keys want to be found, she might say, because she always misplaced her keys, but of course it was never her fault, it was the keys that had gone off somewhere.

And why, out of all the girls he could have had, why had Silas chosen this one with her head in the clouds?

Luvera, what do you know? Her voice came small and tremulous from beside her in the front seat, her first words since they’d been in the car.

Luvera flexed her fingers, gripped the wheel. I’m not going to lie to you, Elsa. I’m sorry. Bob Westman called me from the site. He told me Silas got pinned under a tree and that it’s bad. He said to come get you.

Out the window a cut field rolled by, stands of stubbed corn, stiff and pale against the black dirt. The clock on the dashboard read 11:40 a.m.

And Ethan?

Ethan got run down by the skid cart. The team spooked, I guess. They found him first and they told me that he was okay.

But not Silas.

I’m sorry, Elsa. If it was me, I would want to be prepared. She glanced over, then back. How on earth could this young woman possibly be prepared? Only a handful of guests came for her on the day of the wedding, all of them from out of state. Her father did not come. It was Ethan who walked Elsa down the aisle, wearing a houndstooth jacket with his back ramrod straight, and the look on his face like he’d been waiting for that moment his whole entire life.

Bob told me that it was bad and to come get you, Luvera repeated. He told me to bring you right away to the site.

To the site? Elsa said. Aren’t they bringing him to the hospital? Why have us go all the way to the site if— She inhaled, turned away.

Luvera kept her gaze on the road and her hands on the wheel. The car moved alone along the empty road and the two women stared out.

3

They pulled into the entrance of the Westman place and followed the dirt track lined with pine and birch, a road made back in the thirties and wide enough to fit a logging truck. Elsa had never met Bob Westman, but Silas talked about him, the retired cabinetmaker who owned a hundred and fifty acres on the west bank of the Brule River. To cushion his nest egg, he was logging off some of his bigger trees, but he didn’t want to tear up his forest with heavy equipment crushing his saplings and compacting the ground. So, he hired Silas and his crew with their draft horses and skids.

Whips of red and blue light flashed through the trees and Elsa from the front seat recognized a few of the men who worked with her husband, moving in the distance through the woods. They wore brown Carhartt overalls with flannel shirts and moved among the trees alongside the medical technicians in their neon vests. The Jeep pulled up next to the emergency vehicles, all of the trucks and cruisers parked askew with back doors thrown open, the ambulance with its equipment and beds—arranged like the pictures she’d seen on boxed Lego building sets, The Emergency Vehicle and The Police and Rescue.

I’ll take Finn, Luvera said. You go on ahead.

Where should I go? What should I do? She clutched the diaper bag, hugged it to her chest. Oh my god, Hester.

What?

I’m supposed to pick Hester up from school!

We’ll get her on the way to the hospital.

No, no we can’t. She’s on this field trip. They won’t get back until three.

We’ll figure something out. Luvera lifted Finn, shut the door. We’ll call somebody at the school or someone will go get her.

The buzzing had left her body and she felt hollow, not connected to the ground. Finn’s little face rode above Luvera’s shoulder and Elsa followed. She heard her feet rustling below her in the leaves and smelled the forest must they stirred up, but they did not seem to belong to her, as if she were riding around inside her body like a passenger, gliding from here to there, past the ambulance, past the people. Inside her mind she was still talking to her son. We’re moving as if in a dream, aren’t we? Yes, we are. Yes indeedy.

Why don’t you go on ahead, Luvera said. I see Silas over there.

Where? She didn’t see him, Silas strong and outspoken and most comfortable when outdoors.

Over there. Luvera lifted her chin.

He was lying down, strapped to a board, wearing the flannel shirt he’d put on that morning. His neck and head rested on a thick foam wedge and oxygen tubes branched into his nose, but his eyes were open, facing up. Elsa moved toward the EMTs who carried him. They picked their way carefully through the debris, their voices like the rustle of leaves as they stepped over downed limbs and branches. She arrived as they brought him to a waiting gurney.

Silas! she called, and reached out. A pair of hands landed on her shoulders. Someone said, Please, don’t touch him. Another said, This is the wife.

The wheels of the gurney rolled out over the dirt and she walked beside him, holding her face above his. Hold on, she told him. Just please hold on. She searched and strained, waiting for some glimmer, some sign that he knew she was there. The sky-shadows of the canopy drifted across the lenses of his eyes like clouds past the windows of a vacant house. She stopped. They went on, and he disappeared behind the ambulance.

A black dog appeared, wagging its tail. It licked the tops of her shoes, the cuffs of her pants. The smell of pine resin and sawdust filled her nose and the small bones of her face vibrated like glass about to shatter.

Elsa, get in. They don’t have room for us. Luvera hurried around the Jeep and buckled in Finn, the opening and closing of car doors. We’ll follow them out.

A fiery glaze of sweat on her skin. She had been doing laundry on a Tuesday, it was a beautiful day, and now she was here in these woods, as if someone or something had moved her here to this exact spot, set her down inside this body, this shell, where she would see things and feel things she never expected, while the world in turn waited, like the space just before breath, it waited, as if asking her, baiting her, What will you